Discuss how you used genre in one of your products

For our advanced portfolio, my group and I created a music video for the song 'I'm 17' by Rizzle Kicks. The genre of our music video was a hybrid rap/indie video, but could mainly be recognised as an urban video.

We took inspiration for our video from similar UK based artists, and many comparisons can be drawn between their videos and our one. Artists such as The Streets and Ed Sheeran use similar low budget settings, typical of the grey streets of London. Their videos are far from glamorous but the audience relate to them as it helps the artist come across as genuine and part of their crowd. We also connected with the 'realness' of the audience by featuring home footage in our video such as the amateur-looking shot of our artist drinking a beer while relaxing in a lounge chair.

Although our video was more urban aesthetically to reflect our key inspirations, we also had to consider the fact that we had a dual audience, with the fact that as well as featuring rap lyrics and structure, the song featured an Arctic Monkeys indie/rock instrumental. We therefore did not conform too much to any urban stereotypes which could alienate our audience, instead portraying our artist as the most stereotypical teenager one could imagine; being a young man who appears rather rebellious with his drinking and partying habits which were mentioned in the lyrics. These activities were also portrayed in the video with the shot of the empty beer bottles at the end of the night in the house. We did recognise in hindsight however that we perhaps could have shown more narrative in terms of activities in various locations, rather than just the scene in the house with the alcohol.

This shows how our narrative was very fragmented and very limited, at the expense of more close up shots of our artist, such as the booth shots. We felt these shots were important again to make our artist feel genuine, but also because this genre consists much of performance. Most urban videos very much revolve around the artist and showing them confidently perform. We also thought about repeatability (would people want to watch our video more than once?) and therefore added some humorous shots every here and there such as shots of our artist dancing and the shot at the end of him running up the stairs like Rocky. This would keep people hooked to the end just to watch a particularly funny part they like. We looked into Goodwin's theory that music videos are an extension of the lyrics, which applies to our video in some aspects as we made some shots correspond to lyrics, such as the shot of our artist walking in with a box of beer when it says "6 o'clock already? Get the booze in!".

Our video mainly used the hybrid indie/rap genre as a way to appeal to both indie and rap audiences, however our video still mainly fits into the UK contemporary urban genre, as we used the convention as revolving our video around the artist and their performance. We also used many conventional 'street' shots such as those which can be seen in Jme's 'Sidetracked' video and The Streets' 'Fit But You Know It' video.